Still no cooling off for Sweden's property market
The severe shortage of housing stock and swift countermeasures undertaken by Sweden's government and central bank meant that Sweden's real estate market did not see a great deal of adverse change. Olof Manner, head of research for Swedbank, explained that prices had risen by about 50% since 2008, adding that there were signs the house price boom was slowing down. Prices rose by 15% in 2015, compared to 2014. By 2016, this growth rate had dropped to 10%, and in January 2017, house price rises were merely 7% higher than they were in the same month a year earlier. This is mostly due to tough intervention by Sveriges Riksbank, who ordered banks to apply stricter lending criteria when assessing mortgage applicants' debt-to-income ratio. Sweden's government also applied the brakes in June 2016, introducing mortgage amortization rules that force people to pay off their loans faster. Fixed mortgage rates have also gone up slightly.
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